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The Gospel According to Jimmy

Twentyfive years after leaving the White House, Jimmy Carter breaks it down on faith, UFOs, greedy Republicans, and that pain in the ass known as Ted Kennedy

You call yourself a bornagain evangelical Christian, but you draw the line at the word fundamentalist. Can you define those terms

I define fundamentalism as a group of invariably male leaders who consider themselves superior to other believers. The fundamentalists believe they have a special relationship with God. Therefore their beliefs are inherently correct, being those of God, and anyone who disagrees with them are first of all wrong, and second inferior, and in extreme cases even subhuman. Also, fundamentalists don't relish any challenge to their positions. They believe any deviation from their own Godordained truth is a derogation of their own responsibility. So compromise or negotiating with others, or considering the opinion of others that might be different, is a violation of their faith. It makes a great exhibition of rigidity and superiority and exclusion.

**It seems that the more devout a person becomes in their faith and their Bible and their church, the more difficult it would be not to feel that way. **

Paul established three little churches in Galatia on a supple but profound belief that we are saved by the grace of God through our faith in Jesus Christ. That was his basic message, and Peter and other disciples did the same thing. What Paul condemned in the strongest letters is that believers in the little churches began to embellish that fundamental with other requirements, saying that you had to become a Jew first, you had to be circumcised to be a Christian, you can't eat the meat that's been sacrificed to idols and be a Christian, you have to worship on a particular holy day to be a Christian, you have to accept a certain apostle as the best representative of Christ to be a Christian. So they began to embellish the basic foundation of Christian faith by humancreated additional requirements. And that was the origin of fundamentalism.

So you would define fundamentalists as embellishers.

Absolutely—and creating definitions of Christianity If you don't agree with my embellishment, then you can't be one of us.

What about things that do seem to be in the fundamentals For example, I know you've grappled with abortion.

I've never believed that if Jesus was confronted with the question, that he would approve abortion. There are millions of people who disagree with me on both sides. They believe that abortion begins when the male sperm is ejaculated. Others believe that abortion is okay up until the end of the first three months of the pregnancy. Others believe that a woman should have full rights to control her own body. I presume that those who believe in the different nuances concerning abortion can all be faithful and devout Christians. I don't have any objection to that. But my own belief is that Christ would not approve abortion unless the woman's life was in danger.

If the problem with fundamentalists is that they impose their rules on others, you might also ask yourself, What rules do I impose For example, you opposed federal funding of abortion.

I did everything I possibly could to minimize abortion and to discourage abortion while still complying with the law as ordained by the Supreme Court.

But it seems like this is one of those areas where it's difficult to draw the line. You believe you know the will of God.

If I were a purist in my faith, I couldn't hold public office and preside over a nation that honored abortion. But when I went into politics and I ran for office, I was willing as a state senator and as a governor and as a president to take an oath before God that I would uphold the laws of the districts that I served. There were times when I was able to change the laws. But until they were changed, I had to comply with them. So when people have asked me about this, I always tell them that this was the most difficult issue I had to face, because I was inherently against abortion, but I was required to impose the law.

If you had the power to change that law, would you

I can live with Roe v. Wade. Lateterm abortion is something I would have vetoed. I don't believe that lateterm abortion is appropriate. That's obnoxious to me.

If abortion is against the will of God as you understand it, shouldn't you oppose it at the most the elementary stage of development

Well, I have my personal beliefs, and in fact my own personal belief is to do away with the death penalty as well. But our Constitution so far permits the states to be autonomous in imposing the death penalty, and the Supreme Court has gone back and forward on it. My wife and I interceded through the court as strong as we could a year ago, with public statements and letters to human rights organizations, to do away with the ruling that permitted the ecution of juveniles. So we have tried to intervene that way.

But not on abortion.

That's correct.

You've also been able to blend your scientific background with your spiritual beliefs. Has it ever been difficult to reconcile the training of science, which demands evidence, with faith, which is in many ways the opposite

No. Faith is believing in something that cannot be proven. You can't prove the existence of God. You can't prove that Jesus Christ is the son of God. You can't prove many things in the Bible, so for someone to have confidence in that, you have to have faith.

Do you think that if you had been raised in an Islamic culture, you would been comfortable in that faith

I would surmise that I would.

But based on what you believe now, you would have been wrong.

That may be true. But Jesus said, "Judge not, that you be not judged." It's not for me to say that an ignorant Ethiopian who lives around a lake at the origin of the Blue Nile, where I was four days ago, and has never heard of Christ is condemned. I can't believe that. And I can't say that a child as you just described, that grew up with Islamic teachings and that believes in Mohammed and Allah, would be condemned. It's not my role to condemn people. That's a role to be played by God almighty.

But this would be about a sense of loss on your own part.

There would be. To know what I know now, I would be aggrieved if I had never known about Jesus Christ, because I have tried to apply, in a faltering way, the teachings of Jesus Christ. It's been an inspiration to me, it's been a guide to me, it's been a stabilizing factor in my life. It has permeated my consciousness.

This will sound like the same question, but if you had been raised by atheists, do you think you would have had an inner feeling of faith

I think so.

Wouldn't it be hard without the guidance of others

I believe that when I approached adulthood, I would have been exploring the authenticity or the veracity or the applicability of the Christian faith. If I had been raised as an atheist and I had gone into the outside world and all of a sudden I realized that I was living in a nation where the majority of people profess faith in Christ, I would have wanted to explore the beliefs of others to see if it was applicable to me.

It seems difficult to imagine someone coming into the vast realm of religious offerings and having any idea where to begin. With so many options, they could very well all be wrong.

I accept the fact that some of my beliefs could be wrong. There may be some fallibilities in my own personal beliefs, sure. I can't change my mind just because I think I might be wrong. My present beliefs have been evolved over seventyfive years of thought and study, analysis, teaching.

One of the other aspects of your life that struck me as a conflict between your experience and your scientific training was that you saw a UFO.

I saw an unidentified flying object. I've never believed that it came from Mars. I know enough physics to know that you can't have vehicles that are tangible in nature flying from Mars, looking around, and then flying back. But I saw an object one night when I was preparing to give a speech to a Lions Club. There were about twentyfive of us men standing around. It was almost time for the Lions Club supper to start, which I would eat and then I would give a speech. I was in charge of fiftysix Lions Clubs in southwest Georgia back in the late '60s. And all of a sudden, one of the men looked up and said, "Look, over in the west!" And there was a bright light in the sky. We all saw it. And then the light, it got closer and closer to us. And then it stopped, I don't know how far away, but it stopped beyond the pine trees. And all of a sudden it changed color to blue, and then it changed to red, then back to white. And we were trying to figure out what in the world it could be, and then it receded into the distance. I had a tape recorder—because as I met with members of Lions Clubs, I would dictate their names on the tapes so I could remember them—and I dictated my observations. And when I got home, I wrote them down. So that's an accurate description of what I saw. It was a flying object that was unidentified. But I have never thought that it was from outer space.

One of the promises you made in 1976 was that if you were elected, you would look into the reports from Roswell and see if there had been any coverups. Did you look into that

Well, in a way. I became more aware of what our intelligence services were doing. There was only one instance that I'll talk about now. We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic—a twinengine plane, small plane. And we couldn't find it. And so we oriented satellites that were going around the earth every ninety minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn't find it. So the director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went in a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellite over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane.

That must have been surreal for you. You're the president of the United States, and you're getting intelligence information from a woman in a trance in California.

That's exactly right.

How did your scientific mind process that

With skepticism. Whether it was just a gross coincidence or…I don't know. But that's one thing that I couldn't explain. As far as covering up possible flights from distant satellites or distant heavenly bodies, I don't believe in that, and there's no evidence that it was ever covered up. Or extraterrestrial people coming to earth, I don't think that's ever happened.

In a way, just the fact that you promised the American people you would look into it is reflective of how much of an outsider you were to Washington.

That's true.

Looking back, do you think that you could have been elected if not for the hunger for honesty after Watergate

No, I don't think so. I didn't have any money, and I was almost completely unknown outside of Georgia, and I had never served in Washington. I had only spent a few days there in my entire life. But it was a propitious time for me. Fortune smiled on me. People were looking for some breath of fresh air, some outsider. I told the first ten people who I could get to come and hear me that if I ever made a misleading statement, they shouldn't vote for me. I said, "I'll never lie to you." And that resonated.

Once you got to Washington, even though you had a Democratic Congress, it wasn't easy.

My main problem was with the liberal Democrats. I was conservative on defense. I had spent eleven years of my life in the navy, and I wanted a strong defense. And I believed in a balanced budget. They thought that was anathema to the basic Democratic faith. After a few months, Ted Kennedy challenged me and told everybody to oppose what I was doing.

It sounds like there was a social component, too, with all the gladhanding that goes on in Washington and the drinks after tennis and things like that. You didn't like the politicking.

That's true, and that was a mistake I made. I would have been better off if I had entwined myself into the social life of Washington with the Washington Post leaders and the eveningcocktailparty circuit. I would have made some alliances there that could have been quite valuable to me, but it was anathema to me. It was not my way of life. It was a political mistake.

It must have been a real slap in the face when Kennedy ran against you.

Well, we've gotten over it now. He and I are basically compatible on overall political philosophy. So I don't have any hard feelings. But when I got the nomination at the convention, Kennedy came on the stand and ostentatiously refused to shake hands with me. I went up and stuck out my hand, he stood there for a while and turned around. Wouldn't shake my hand. In front of 6,000 or whatever it was Democratic delegates. And he never gave me any support.

Have you ever discussed that with Kennedy

We had one discussion in the White House as we were approaching the general election, but it was not a successful discussion. I tried to get Ted Kennedy to make a public endorsement of me and to urge his supporters to support me, but he was very, very cool. And never did do it. But that's beside the point. Of course, I hated to be defeated in 1980, but the way it's turned out, this has been by far the best time of my life.

Someone said that you were the only person in history who used the presidency as a steppingstone to greatness.

I've heard that.

I wanted to talk briefly about the prospects in the Middle East. What are your feelings about the prospects for this Gaza pullout

Well, at the moment, I'm not hopeful. I have been recently, but I think now the prospects are not good, because Sharon has announced that if any representatives of Hamas run for parliament, he is not going to permit the Palestinians to cross the checkpoints. There are hundreds of checkpoints, in some places every few hundred yards.

This has been one of the big issues with the Bush administration's policy in the Middle East, too who to deal with and who not to deal with. I wonder if you could comment on the decision not to deal with Arafat.

I think that was a mistake. They—Sharon and Bush together—castrated Arafat as far as any sort of political effectiveness. And then they condemned Arafat because he couldn't control the Palestinians. He was confined, as you know, to two or three rooms.

But the Bush administration points to that and says, "We may have lost four years, but we got Abu Mazen."

Well, at this moment, I don't see any prospects for progress.

Probably your most famous speech was the "crisis of confidence" speech in 1979, and a critical element was the idea that we have to make sacrifices. Today we have a very different policy espoused, with Dick Cheney saying that conservation is a personal virtue and not a basis for policy. I wonder how you react.

America is not at war. We're not really at war with terrorists. There is no commitment of the American people to make a sacrifice to deal with the threat of terrorism. We're not sacrificing our beliefs to accommodate those of France or Russia or others who might have participated in the Iraqi war. And you can't find an American, except for a half of 1 percent who are in Iraq or who have loved ones in Iraq, who've made any sacrifice in the last three or four years. You haven't. I haven't. In fact, I make a lot of money, and my tas have gone down. So there's been a policy here that is incredible, of enriching people in a time of war and putting the burden on poor people and future generations in order to make sure we don't make sacrifices in order to meet the exigencies of threats to our country.

And whose failure is that

The leaders in Washington, from the White House to the majority in the House and Senate.

It's got to be hard for you as an exPresident, with the customary code of conduct that you're not supposed to be too critical. Is that a tough balancing act for you

Yes. Yes. There are some seminal changes that are being made in the basic policy of my country with which I disagree. There are some people that really believe that to remove taxation from the rich is the right way for this country to go. There are people who really believe that preemptive war is the right way for America to ert its foreignpolicy influence. There are people who really believe that endangered species ought not to be protected because it might inhibit economic development. There are people who really believe that a minimum wage of half as much as it is in most developed countries is the right way for our country to be. But the American people have not yet decided which direction the country should go.

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